This chapter explores the relationship between Iran and Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s, placing it in a regional context. The two countries forged close ties during the 1930s, when the Iranian crown prince, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, married Egyptian Princess Fawzia Faud. Shared histories of colonial interference shaped the friendship between Egypt and Iran during the oil nationalisation crisis, yet in the years after the 1952 coup in Egypt, which brought down the monarchy and ultimately brought Nasser to power, Egypt and Iran’s paths diverged. At the Bandung Conference in 1955, while Nasser was inspired by the prospects of Afro-Asian solidarity, the shah’s government was concerned with the need for moderation, and to maintain close ties to the West. One year later, after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Nasser became the leading voice of pan-Arabism, which the shah viewed as a major threat both to regional security and to his reign. This divergence in perceptions of their places in the Global South ultimately led to a break in relations between Iran and Egypt. This chapter examines in detail the events that led to this fracture, and the ultimate emergence of Nasser as the shah’s main adversary.

This chapter examines the evolution of Soviet foreign policy from Stalin's death in 1953 until the 1956 Suez Crisis. It begins with a discussion of the power struggle in the Soviet leadership, which led to the arrest and execution of Lavrentii Beria. Beria, as well as his rivals in leadership, briefly explored prospects for detente with the West, including by effectively giving up on socialism in East Germany. By 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev consolidated power in his hands, such prospects faded for two reasons. First, the nuclear revolution emboldened Khrushchev, eliminating the need for concessions to the West. Second, decolonization in the “third world” opened new horizons for the Soviet leader as he embraced opportunities to project Soviet influence to remote shores, seeking a clientele and – through their recognition of Soviet greatness – a form of revolutionary legitimacy. The chapter offers an in-depth analysis of Khrushchev's bromance with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and an overview of the consequences of the Suez Crisis for Soviet foreign policy.

Iran’s simultaneous relations with Israel and the Arab world left it in a precarious position. After World War II, Iran had to adapt to the shifting power plays in a politically charged Middle East. The thirty years between 1945 and 1975 witnessed the waning of Iran’s influence in the Persian Gulf and the rise of Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. During much of the Nasser era, until Egypt’s defeat in 1967, Iran’s relationship with Egypt remained tense. Fervent Arab nationalist ideologies identified the shah’s Iran as a state aligned firmly with America and the West. Iran’s support for Israel became a frequent negative target of the Arab press. In the Persian Gulf, however, Iran did not see eye to eye with America or Britain and tried to forge a separate path with Saudi Arabia and the newly configured countries of the region. Iran had to tread gingerly to maintain amicable relations with its neighbors. In the end Iran could only adequately safeguard its security as its regional isolation became a new reality.

This chapter considers the loss of confidence in Britain’s far horizons which became a major post-war preoccupation as the moral axioms of ‘global reach’ faltered. By the 1950s, the burden of shouldering an extensive array of overseas bases and tactical deployments had become increasingly intolerable. But despite these material constraints, successive British governments, their service chiefs and the wider ‘defence community’ of strategic analysts, academics, and journalists found it exceedingly difficult to contemplate even the most glaringly urgent reductions. Cold calculations of strategic priorities could never be entirely insulated from the alluring tug of a belief system inherited from former, more exalted times. The ensuing paralysis was symbolised by the 1956 Suez crisis that revealed the stark limits of Britain’s world-power aspirations. Historians continue to debate whether the 1956 Suez crisis really devastated popular morale to the extent that is routinely claimed. It is argued here that the deeper impact of Suez can be traced through its dissonant resonances around the globe, puncturing not only the prestige of Anthony Eden’s enfeebled government, but also the feasibility of a world conceived in terms of Britain’s ubiquitous ‘presence’. For the challenge it posed to the governing assumptions about extended horizons and elastic frontiers, Suez exemplifies the diminishing reach of the idea of Britain itself.

This chapter explores Le Carrç's novels as a means through which a pecularly British view of Cold War legalities might be explored or examined. It is argued that Le Carrç evokes in his novels an account of British moral confusion and psychological disintegration that were induced, in part, by a decline in its international political standing and its inability to sustain a coherent international normative vision. As a consequence, it was unable to uphold the international law of the Atlantic Charter and the UN Charter.

This chapter focuses upon the making of the Suez Crisis in international law. It is argued that paying attention to how a crisis was made out of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company helps us to understand the making of Cold War international law in two ways. First, it invites us to move away from the standardised narratives of the significance of the Suez Crisis for international law as, for example, the realisation of the United Nations Charter’s prohibition on the use of force or the moment at which peacekeeping emerged as an innovative (executive) solution to international crises. Secondly, an attention to the production of crisis pulls back from narratives of the Cold War that emphasise its ‘non-juridical’ character. In contrast to this, I argue that the crises that apparently plagued the Cold War world were so significant precisely because they marked a radical challenge to the existing international legal order. The Suez Crisis can be seen, then, as a jurisdictional contest over the authorship of international law, or as a struggle over the authority to authorise.

This chapter explores how restraint functions within, through, and from democracies. It delineates generational analysis and how restraint fits into that theorization. It provides illustrations of generational conflict through three centuries of US history. Restraint appears in the form of areactivegeneration’s rejection of the ideologies and practices of actionist generations. The infrequency of restraint in US settings over the past three centuries can be explained because (1) reactive generations are only one of four types to emerge in US political settings and (2) reactive generations arerecessive(as opposed to dominant) and play a prominent role in the political, social, and cultural institutional settings of a polity for only brief (roughly one or two decades) periods of time.

No problem has proved more intractable for the United Nations than that of the former British mandate of Palestine. Seventy years after the organisation first dealt with the problem, Israel occupies some of the territory of one of its neighbours, has poor relations with others, and has an unresolved relationship with the Palestinian state that was meant to have been born in 1947, but which has still not successfully emerged into the light. It is possible to argue that UN policy in the area has been wrong-headed from the start: certainly, it has not been successful. Only Kashmir can rival it for longevity on the United Nations’ agenda: seven decades after the organisation took up the issue of Palestine, there is no solution in sight.